mod_rewrite issue

wasson

This problem is driving me completely insane. I'm trying to use mod_rewrite rules to make better URLs. I used one of those generators to make my rules for me, and one of them works perfectly, the other won't work no matter what I try. Here's the text in my .htaccess:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule p/(.)/(.)/$ /p.php?$1=$2
RewriteRule ^{users/(.*).htm$} /profile.php?user=$1

So the first rule works perfectly... it redirects this:

/p.php?file=file

to:

/p/file/file/

The second is what I'm having an issue with. It should take this:

/profile.php?user=tim

and redirect to... well, anything really. In the above example, in theory, it should go to /users/tim.htm. Ideally, I'd like it to redirect to:

/user/tim/

But I would take anything at this point. I'm trying to get a solid hold on rewrite rules, since I think I'm going to use them a lot in a new project, but this is just really frustrating me. Especially since all I get is a 404 error when I get something wrong rather than a helpful error message.

Anyway, any advice out there?

xblue

Hi wasson,

what I found really helpful during development: set the redirect flag to actually see what happens. Simply add [R] at the end of your rules. There is also a rewrite log somewhere in apache I think.

wasson

Thanks for the tip, but adding the [R] didn't help... I'm still simply getting a 404 error.

I don't have physical access to the server. It's a shared server. Can I still take a look at the error logs somehow?

xblue

You will probably need to ask them to find out.

So you still cannot see where you have been redirected to, not even in the address bar? Then there is another redirection happening on 404 situations, so the R flag would not really help. I would check if the host allows to disable this 404 redirection.